JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2006

Perhaps the way you get around the constant fear of Total World Annihilation is to triviliaze the thing that would bring this state of affairs about.  I’m not sure that this has been the case too very often in the history of Potential WorldWide Disasters outside of the great atomic fear of 1950-1990 (and soon to re-emerge, perhaps/probably).  So far as I know there were no V-2 Motels to correspond to the Atomic Motels of the American 1950’s;  nor was there Pestilence Wax, or AIDS Cakes, or Influenza Burgers, or Plague Patter, and so on.  I’m certain that some cases exists outside the atomic realm, but putting the atomic bomb to work on the runaway train that was an advertising antithesis to itself seems to me to be so far beyond anything else that I can think of…well, nothing seems to compete with its ready meanness to the great/monsterous possibilities of itself.  To wind up with a picture of an “a-bomb” on a ball of kid gum seems spectacularly evaporative to what the atomic bomb was.

I’ve collected some examples of the atomic fear reversal at work:

[via retronaught]